DeepSeek agrees to lead a seed round in Winverse AI, a robot-AI start-up valued at about $400m, Bloomberg reports

DeepSeek has agreed to lead a seed round of tens of millions of dollars in Winverse AI, a start-up building AI for robots, Bloomberg reported on 12 October, citing people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg said the deal would value Winverse at about $400m after the investment. Bloomberg's article opened only to its preview; The Next Web and EqualOcean carry its figures.

Bloomberg also reported that Long-Z Investments, the investment arm of the food-delivery group Meituan, has committed money to the round. The people it cited said the deal is not final, and that the valuation and the list of investors could still change. DeepSeek, Long-Z and Winverse's founder did not respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment, The Next Web reported.

Winverse was founded this year by Hu Han, who used to lead Tencent's vision-language and robotics AI teams, and who left during a reshuffle of Tencent's AI research group, according to The Next Web. The company is still in stealth, EqualOcean reports, and has said nothing public about its products.

The deal takes DeepSeek, best known for its open-weight language models, into robotics, as the lab raises a large round of its own, which the Switchboard has covered separately.

• Reported DeepSeek has agreed to lead a seed round of tens of millions of dollars in Winverse AI at a valuation of about $400m, Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg (BGov preview)
• Reported Meituan's Long-Z Investments has also committed, and the deal is not final, Bloomberg reported, according to The Next Web. The Next Web
• Reported Founder Hu Han previously led Tencent's vision-language and embodied foundation-model teams, EqualOcean reported, citing Bloomberg. EqualOcean